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When Given Colored Construction Paper, Wasps Build Rainbow Colored Nests

We had to use an old-school GC much like this in one of our teaching labs. It felt like traveling back to another age.

Old school UV-visible spectrometry

There’s something oddly satisfying about watching the needle move

Matching your balloon to your reaction is important. #aesthetic

The Academy Awards won by scientists

Did you know there is another set of Oscars devoted to the scientific side of movie making?

Two weeks before the televised Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives out awards to the innovators who make blockbusters like “The Martian” or “Mad Max: Fury Road” possible. 

Combining style *AND* brains, the Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony celebrates technological innovations ranging from camera rigs to software systems to inflatable green screens.  

This year’s recipients included Michael John Keesling, who developed the Image Shake, a remote-controlled lens attachment that creates a jerky, hand-held look without shaking the camera. The tool has been used in movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and the Jason Bourne films to create a gritty, “real” aesthetic seen in a lot of contemporary action thrillers.

Brian McLean and Martin Meunier won an award for pioneering the use of rapid prototyping, a process that allows animators to quickly and exponentially produce replacement puppet parts for stop-motion films like “Coraline.”

Past winners of the awards have also included academics. 

UC Santa Barbara’s computer science professor, Theodore Kim, won a technical achievement award for creating an algorithm that helps simulate realistic smoke and fire effects seen in dozens of movies, including “Super 8″ and “Avatar.”

Curious about the science behind these effects? Check out the video below:

Iconic American Landscape Photos, Recreated with Junk Food

For their project “Processed Views,” which is currently on view in the exhibit “Changing Circumstances” at the FotoFest 2016 Biennial, the collaborators Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman have produced cheeky dioramas that pull Carleton Watkins’s iconic images brashly into the industrial modern world. Using all manner of highly processed foods—Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Coca-Cola, marshmallows, fleshy stacks of bologna—they recreated the photographer’s famous landscapes from Yosemite and other California sites as garish candy lands.

See more from this processed-food world. 

pH strip I think you’re confused

Earth as seen from Saturn.

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Artist Sachiko Kodama is known for her mesmerizing ferrofluid sculptures. Ferrofluids are a colloidal liquid consisting of nanoscale ferromagnetic particles and a carrier fluid such as water or oil. They can react strongly to magnetic fields, forming spikes, brain-like whorls, and even labyrinths. (Photo credits: Sachiko Kodama; via freshphotons)